While the league and teams struggled with concerns about due process—deactivating, reactivating, and then deactivating again the player in the child abuse scandal—women and children bruised, battered, and knocked unconscious have more or less faded from the country’s conscience, despite gruesome video and photographs as artifacts of violence spreading from the playing field into the lives of professional athletes and the people they claim to love.

At the core of when and why this league and the teams take actions against a wide range of violent behavior—bullying, domestic violence, child abuse—not confined to real and artificial grass neatly divided into carefully measured gradients of 5 yards by 53 yards appears to be one single rule of thumb: Market ethics.

Owners and leaders in this league seem driven by the dynamic between public opinion (primarily the customers) and damage done to the brand.

While one team stood before cameras juggling their ineptitude in the face of graphic photographs and repeated player confessions of his actions taken as so-called discipline of a four-year-old child, that team’s sponsors watched their logos prominent in the background, and then a major hotel chain, a major fast-food restaurant, and a major beer producer (known itself for blanketing that major sport’s telecasts with sanctimonious advertisements begging viewers to drink their beer but no-no-no on drinking and driving) began to offer the team’s owners the moral clarity they had been missing all along.

The hotel chain dropped their sponsorship and the other sponsors have made public statements denouncing child abuse as not consistent with their corporate philosophy (at least that is comforting, right?).

And there the people of this country stand, facing the power of market ethics in a society bound to the dollar above all else.

Battered women, knocked unconscious, and children scarred at the hands of grown professional athletes—please wait while we check with our sponsors.

We’ll start a campaign, we’ll release statements sternly worded (but tempered by our lawyers), and we’ll donate money to the right causes because the market has spoken and we now know where the lines are.

Yes, we can hire gigantic and athletic men to batter the hell out of each other for everyone else to watch—some permanently disabled, their brains rattled to the point of no return.

But we get it now: When the same men hit women or children (and video or pictures come to light), we must take a stand because we want everyone to know that the customer is our main concern (or at least those customers’ disposable income, disposable as the athletes themselves and their families left in the carnage of their unbridled violence).